Oh, Microsoft, you’ve disappointed me. And you were doing so well.

In the last few weeks I’ve enjoyed using Windows 8, moving to a Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7.5 and even migrated a couple of clients from Google Apps to Office 365. Eek!

Microsoft Security Essentials continues to impress and recent events have even made them appear more clued up on security and patching than Apple. So, how have they spoilt this?

Well, it’s a little Optional Update they have sent out – Bing Desktop.

Right click, Hide update

Now, it’s hard enough getting clients to click on the little update warnings and making sure they keep safe and sound by running them. So it really doesn’t help when they try to do the right thing and download something that completely confuses them.

The Bing Desktop installs a search box onto your desktop, changes your homepage and replaces your search defaults. Like most other annoying toolbars. However, It also changes your desktop background or ‘wallpaper’.  So the client with best intentions ended up well and truly confused!

I know it was only ‘Optional’ but I don’t think it should have been there at all.

Putting aside the purists’ argument that addiction can only really exist in the physical addiction to a chemical sense (I gave up arguing with him), the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale has been developed to see if you are hooked to Facebook.

According to the report by the University of Bergen there are six signs you need to look out for:

• You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan use of Facebook.
• You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.
• You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.
• You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.
• You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.
• You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.

For each of the above signs, consider if you experience that sign very rarely, rarely, sometimes, often, and very often. If you answer “often” or “very often” for at least 4 of the signs, then you could have a Facebook addiction.

Personally, I refuse to take the test until there is a Facebook app for it.

In the meantime, if you think you can handle it, please go and like any or all of these Facebook pages…

http://www.facebook.com/hdgnet
http://www.facebook.com/fairlymarvellous
http://www.facebook.com/deargeek

…dare you like all 3?

Typical, isn’t it? Could I be given access to my shiny, new Google Drive at 9am? No, I had to be given access at 11pm. The night before BNI (which means being up before 6).

Google Drive? Let me at it!

Can I resist having a go? Of course not!

So, 5 minutes in, is this going to hurt my ongoing love affair with SugarSync? No, not yet. It suffers from the same limitation as Dropbox, only files in a particular folder are synchronised. I find SugarSync so much more powerful.

But, for those looking to have a shared folder / server like experience, this could be big, very big.

Watch this space!

Apparently, although no doubt this is not cast in stone, come June Whitstable will have their broadband connection upgraded. “Fibre to the Cabinet” will roll out, which means instead of dodgy old copper between your house and the exchange, most of the distance will be covered by fibre optic cable.

So the broadband connection between the exchange and the little green cabinet round the corner from you will get a lot better. And boy, do we need it…

I’ve been fiddling around with mobiles and SIMs while I upgrade to a Nokia Lumia 800 (more on that in another post, I suspect) and decided to run some speed tests. First of all, on my normal broadband connection:

3.46Mbps down, 0.65Mbps up

Then, on my 3 mobile connection:

4.89Mbps down, 1.57Mbps up

Yes, that’s a 40% increase using the mobile.

Roll on June, I cannot wait!

When I worked for a very big corporate, one of my colleagues was blind. Of the many things I learned from him (besides what it’s like to share an office with a dog*) one was the importance of website accessibility.

This guy was responsible for selecting and managing service providers for this big company – to be selected to provide a service to a company this size can completely change your business. Of course, when your only contact with someone is via email, you’d have no idea he was blind. And so many of those emails would contain the words “see our website for more details” so he would.

The way this guy used his PC was amazing. He had a small Braille device above the keyboard but most of the time he used his headphones. He had software on his PC that would read out every piece of text, menu, pop-up and option box. How he coped with this cacophony I do not know!

What’s this got to do with websites?

Now, your website is your shopfront. And just as you wouldn’t open a shop with a 2-foot step at the door to prevent the disabled getting in, you should be building your website to allow the visually impaired in. There’s some very useful information at the RNIB website about the UK law for website accesibility – yes, this is a legal requirement. In fact, the RNIB started their first case against a website earlier this year.

When this guy visited a website that he couldn’t read, well, that supplier got crossed off the list. Plain and simple.

There are lots of things you can do to make your website more accessible, but three really important starters are:

• Don’t use images as text, unless you have all the text available elsewhere or in ALT tags
• Don’t use tables to layout your design – screen readers hate these. Besides, if you’re a web designer who hasn’t learnt CSS yet, get your coat.
• Don’t build your entire site in Flash – lots of DIY website tools used to be built in Flash but fortunately that is starting to die out. Not so much because they are invisible to the visually impaired – because they don’t work on iPads!

Google cares too

Google indexes sites based on their content – i.e. the text on the page. Headings and text all play a vital role in your website competing against other sites in the all important Google rank. If your site doesn’t have text and headings, it won’t be ranked highly. We all know that adding a few meta keywords to your site does nothing for Google now. And a little description tag at least gives people something to read if they do find your site on Google. But for any useful search phrases, your site will appear right down at the bottom if it doesn’t have some content.

How can I tell what my site looks like to a visually impaired visitor?

The simplest check is to turn off images – this page explains how to disable images in your web browser. Try it now and you’ll see that although it looks a lot less pretty, on this page you can still read all the content and navigate the site. That’s because all our fairly marvellous website design work is accessibility and SEO friendly.

I’ll leave you with a screenshot of a website that demonstrates this perfectly – unfortunately I probably didn’t explain the issue too well so the owner remains someone else’s client! It does look fantastic when the images are turned on though.

How not to build a website

* This dog had a habit of ignoring his basket. I would come back from meetings to find him curled up under my desk – this blonde Labrador went so well with my black suit!

What a day. It started with the rush to get orders in for the Raspberry Pi – no, not a fruit based pastry dish. It’s a credit card sized computer, about as minimal as you can get while remaining functional and bringing with it a hope that it can kickstart a new generation towards getting the skills our IT industry so desperately needs. Brings back memories of my dear, old ZX81, sob.

Although I must admit, I wasn’t in that queue. Instead, I was one of the hordes watching Microsoft for the consumer review release of Windows 8. At the same time, I was also watching news of Facebook’s launch of Timeline for Pages unfold.

Well, I now have both and have found equal levels of “ooh”, “ahh” and “grrr” for each of them. Some things good, some annoying and some that may well be a downright pain in the backside. No doubt, after some sleep, I will write more.

For the time being though, here is my very own sneak preview. It’s Dear Geek’s “new” Facebook Page, viewed on Windows 8…

The Dear Geek Facebook page on Windows 8

We love using iStockphoto – for our advertising, blogs, websites and our clients’ websites when we give them the fairly marvellous Kent website design treatment.

They have very high standards for accepting images into their library which they then combine with great pricing.

Anyway, don’t just take our word for it, sign up by clicking here for 10 free images from www.istockphoto.com

And the great thing is, if you decide to purchase more images, we get some free credits as a bonus too. How cool is that?

I saw this great post “How to Hack Your Facebook Profile Photo with Timeline” over on Gizmodo and had to have a go myself. The idea is, by playing around with your Profile and Cover pictures on Facebook, you can get a pretty nifty effect. I didn’t have the greatest of source pictures, but if you have a look at my Facebook profile you’ll get the gist.

I made this!

If you’ve got Photoshop, head over to Nico’s Facebook Timeline Hack Template post to download the template.

Just been accused of sending out spam? Sadly, it happens a lot. Ok, not to me, but then the theory is I should know what I’m doing (tempting fate).

We’ve just had a laptop in the workshop that proves how easily it happens and how you should never forget the simple solutions. Now the owner of the laptop had been told that she was sending out spam and was able to check step one below. Her usual PC expert had checked step two. But as soon as we knew who her email provider was, we went for step three…

But first, the important question:

Does it matter? My friends will just delete it.

If there is something nasty on your PC that is sending out messages, or someone has access to your email, they could also be sending out your bank, credit card and PayPal details. They could be sending out attachments containing malware infections, or porn. Or worse. They could be sending it to your friends, your colleagues, your boss.

Then there is social engineering – the scams that rely on using you as a trusted friend. Imagine if all your friends received an email saying you were on holiday and had been mugged. You had lost your wallet and your mobile phone – could they please send you some money? They cannot phone you, so they may email to check that it’s a genuine request. But the person carrying out the scam has access to your email, they’ve changed the password and they are pretending to be you.

Sadly, this happens frequently so, yes, it does matter!

Anyway, back to those steps…

1) Make sure you’re not really spamming people

Obvious, I know, but sometimes the best intentioned emails, Facebook updates and tweets can seem perfectly fine to you, but spammy to everyone else.

2) Scan your PC

We’ve said it before, we’ll keep saying it, we highly recommend Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware for this task. The free version is great for cleaning up infected PCs, the paid for version is brilliant at preventing infections and helping you avoid those dodgy, password pinching websites.

3) Change your password

If you have access to a PC that you know is clean, this is the first thing you should do if your email account is sending out spam. It is also why your email password should always be different to all your other passwords and why it is worth changing it regularly.

Your password could have been captured by some malware. But even more likely, it has been collected from another website where you use the same username and password. That site could have been hacked or could have been designed to steal passwords from the offset.

An apple a day doesn’t always keep the doctor away

Just a little warning for your Apple users out there – you are just as likely to fall victim to a spoof or hacked website, so it’s just as important that you change and keep your email passwords unique.

How to change your Hotmail password

1. Click the down arrow next to your email address and select Account

First of all, login to your Hotmail account. In the top, right-hand corner of the screen you will see your email address and a small down-arrow. Click the arrow and select Account from the menu.

In the Account screen, the second block of information is about your Account Security. Your password will be shown as ‘*****’ and to the right there will be a Change link.

2. Click Change in the Account Security section

Finally, enter your new password.

Annoying though it may seem, it’s a good idea to tick that “Make my password expire every 72 days” box.

3. Enter a new password and tick to enable expiry

If you have trouble remembering complex passwords, a long but memorable sentence can be even more effective.

For example, something like “my dog loves grilled sausages” will stick in your head but be very difficult to crack.

If you use Outlook, Windows Live Mail, a mobile phone or some other application to check your mail, next time it tries you will have to enter your new password. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Ok, I should be preaching to the converted here – using social media is a great way to attract more visitors (and therefore potential clients) to your website. So today’s top tips are 3 very simple fixes to increase the chances of those ‘listeners’ converting to visitors. And it’s all about where you put your website address.

Facebook Pages

When you set up a Facebook page one of the fields you fill in is the URL of your website. Great, thanks for the prompt, but that’s not enough. Your link is hidden away on your Information tab which, let’s be honest, a fair number of visitors won’t look at.

Make sure your URL is the first thing in your About section

Now you can put your address in your profile picture, as that appears on every tab, but people can only read and not click on it. Instead, add it to your About box.

The About box can be found below your profile picture, below the list of tabs and just above your number of Likes. There will be a little Edit icon next to it. Because the About information gets truncated, make sure your URL is the first part of the entry.

Having your address in this box definitely increases the number of clicks through to your site.

Twitter

This is a bit of a strange one, as it helps us work around some of the idiosyncrasies of various twitter apps. Again, we all know there is a field for our website address on twitter, but I’d suggest putting it into your Bio as well. Let’s compare these two:

No, not making sense yet...

On twitter.com, the profile on the left has two websites, the one on the right only has one. So what’s the point of that? Well, let’s have a look at the same profiles on a different platform – in this case, Tweetdeck on Android:

...ah, now I get it!

Tweetdeck on Android doesn’t show the usual website link, but it does show the full bio and converts any URLs into links. I don’t know how many other twitter apps do the same, I don’t know how many people use them, but I do know that every little helps.

LinkedIn

Finally, my least favourite site, but a little tip that owes as much to SEO as it does to getting people to click.

Useless...

When you set up your profile on LinkedIn, and enter your website address, you can specify whether it is your Personal Website, Company Website, Blog etc. Make sure you select “Other”. This then gives you an extra field to put the name of your website in.

This helps people to identify what they want to click in, and helps your website’s link juice into the bargain!

...becomes fantastic!

Happy linking everyone!